A project by Vanessa Marr
The ‘Women & Domesticity – What’s your Perspective?’ collaborative arts project, run by artist and academic Vanessa Marr since 2014, explores contemporary perspectives on the everyday lives of women. Through an open call, participants are invited to embroider their domestic thoughts, feelings, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from cleaning cloth to craftivist act. The ever-growing collection includes hundreds of dusters that have been exhibited and presented widely in community, creative and academic contexts across the UK, mainland Europe, and Florida, USA.
Dusters were selected for embroidery and display as a metaphor for domesticity because they are mundane (like most domestic tasks), yet visually appealing in their brilliant bright yellow. This practice asks how hidden and silenced female domestic experiences can be voiced through collective craft practice, and explores how the duster, which signifies domesticity through our cultural knowledge of its purpose as a cleaning cloth, can act as a catalyst for change through collective making. Vanessa regularly promotes this work through exhibition in arts venues, community workshops, and academic publication.
Book onto Vanessa’s Domestic Dusters talk and workshop via the links below!
Contribute to the Domestic Dusters Collection
Throughout the course of Tangled Up, we encourage our visitors and supporters to get involved in Vanessa Marr’s project, Women & Domesticity – What’s your Perspective?
Participants are invited to embroider their domestic thoughts, feelings, complaints, and celebrations as words or images onto a yellow duster. Each duster is unique and hand-stitched, transforming it from a cleaning cloth into a voice for women today. They have been stitched by women across the world, proclaiming a multitude of opinions as act of craftivism (craft and activism) that invites conversations and challenges the legacy of so-called women’s work.
The project has been running since 2014 with an ever-growing exhibiting collection of over 700 dusters.
Source a yellow duster or purchase one from the Gallery, and embroider your own message or image in red thread to add to the Domestic Duster collection, which has previously toured internationally.
To add your duster, please fill in the form below and follow the instructions to either post the duster to us, or drop off in person at Sunny Bank Mills Gallery.
For more information and inspiration images, visit Vanessa’s website.
